Lake Martin Magazine

Last month, the roadsides around Lake Martin burst into color – and the most eye-catching color was a bright Chinese orange. Each spring, the gawdy orange ditch lilies, which are also known as day lilies, tawny day lilies, common orange day lilies, outhouse lilies and (incorrectly) as tiger lilies greet the morning by opening their six-part flowers and facing the sun.

If you know where to look on spring and summer nights – and you’re a bit lucky – you could catch a glimpse of a large, pale green luna moth flying across the Lake Martin landscape.

For the sheer joy of bird watching, it’s hard to beat wood ducks. These amazing birds have it all: a flight call so distinctive that it just sounds like the America’s swampy oak bottoms and creeks, a spooky elusiveness that makes any close-up spotting a big event and a bodacious, over-the-top color scheme that just demands long stares when you do find them.

Ground Cedar, Southern Running Pine, Running Pine, Crowsfoot, Trailing Ground Pine, Fan Clubmoss, Diphasiastrum digitatum, Lycopodium flabelliforme, Lycopodium digitatum … this unusual, primitive plant has gone by a number of names through the years but it’s so distinctive that once you can identify it, you won’t soon forget it.

The Spotted Dusky Salamander, known by scientists as Desmognathus conanti, is a relatively stout, brown salamander with a moderately keeled tail that serves as a vertical paddle when swimming. It’s found all across Alabama, and its range includes most of the Southern United States, from Louisiana to South Carolina.

If you see a large hawk around Lake Martin this time of year, there’s a good chance it’s a red-tailed hawk. There’s also a good chance you can’t tell. Red-tailed hawks are the most common hawk in North America and they are most often seen in the Lake Martin area during the winter months, when northern birds head to warmer climates.

Painted turtles, like American toads, dragonflies and lightning bugs, are among the native wild animals that play a big role in many Southern children’s lives. Most children have, at one time or another, played with painted turtles. Many have kept them as pets.

Clusters of bright purple or magenta berries lining up on a stem are a dead-giveaway for the distinctive, useful and very well named American beautyberry shrub. It’s one of the most striking plants you’ll see in the deep woods around Lake Martin during the early fall.

As you might guess from its common name, the Chinese praying mantis isn’t an American native. But it’s certainly a “naturalized citizen,” having been imported to New England in 1895 to help control native garden pests. It did its job well – so well, in fact, that people are still selling Tendodera sinsensis egg cases in garden specialty stories all across the U.S.

It’s a natural occurrence so bizarre and unusual that now people all around the eastern U.S. are buzzing about it too – the 13-year cicada invasion.